Fresh Goods

Summer’s here kids! Well, actually it appears to have been put on hold for a bit up here but anyway… Here’s some shades from 720 Armour…Price: £74.99From:Hotlines

Looking rather pretty in pink, here are some Straitline SC flat pedals for a grouptest appearing later on in the year. The bodies are made from machined alloy and they run on nickel plated hardened alloy axles. There are 14 replaceable hex sided pins on each side and they run on special polymer bearings which promise to be impervious to dust ingress and unaffected by water. Regardless, Straitline say you can take them to bits in only 10 minutes with a screwdriver if they do need fixing or if you’ve nothing better to do.

What’s in the box? It’s question that’s been gnawing at humanity since the start of time (or rather the invention of boxes), but don’t worry, this particular box is not full of all mankind’s ills…

..it’s a pair of NC-17 Sudpin III Ti S-Pro CNC pedals! Hailing from Germany and coming in this rather fetching and only slightly bonkers wooden case, they’ve got titanium axles, weigh bugger all (claimed 285g for the pair) and run on precision cartridge bearings. We’re looking forward to bouncing them off rocks to see how they stand up. Also in the box are some spare superlight alloy pins for you to use at your own risk and a little tub of threadlocking compound to fit them if you dare. Somewhat puzzling is the rubber glove, which we assume is so you don’t get grubby fingerprints all over the lovely shiny shiny.

You may see a theme developing here. Yup, more high end flat pedals. These are Point One Racing Podium Flats and resident flat pedal geek Jon is rather excited by them. They’re made from a heavily machined bit of 6061 billet and have an exposed axle design to keep them as thin as possible – 13mm tapering down to 11mm in the middle in fact. They’re also much wider than you might think from the pictures in order to give maximum grip. The hollow 4130 steel axles run on four cartridge bearings per pedal. Exciting stuff..

The flat pedal madness continues with a pair of Nuke Proof Proton Mag Ti pedals. As you might guess from the name they’ve got titanium axles and a forged magnesium pedal body. They roll on two sealed bearings and a DU bush per pedal and weight is claimed as 268g for the pair – although the office scales came back with 290g. That’s not a lot of weight either way..

These are Blackspire Sub 3 pedals and tipping the scales at 286g for the pair they’re the lightest so far. That’s even more impressive considering the platform isn’t made from anything as scary-light as magnesium and are instead made from 6061 aluminium alloy. The low weight is due to titanium axles and the huge amount of machining done to make sure any excessive material has been removed.

Looking flash for less cash are the NS Bikes Aerial Pros which have a nice thin, open design and rather fetching shiny finish. There are two sealed bearings and a bushing to keep the CNC machined alloy platform rolling on steel axles so they should be nice and robust. Weight comes in at 386g, which isn’t bad at all..

Not a mountain bike product, but a timely reminder that cyclocross season is fast approaching, these Zipp 303 wheels have come in for our friend Stanny’s new team Ridley bike as it was easier to have them posted to Singletrack. We took the opportunity to whip them out of the box and shoot them while marveling at the silly light weight of them (580g for the front wheel including skewer). You’ll have no excuses if you’re running these this winter…

Again, not a mountain bike component, though you could argue that it’s relevant and essential to riding one. This amazing Bakewell Pudding was sent in by Colin Down, author of the ‘Diagonal Everest’ article in the current issue, reported on here. Col didn’t realise you’re supposed to bribe us before we run a story, rather than after it… It’s a good job we shot the pie while we had the chance as it didn’t last long…

Back to mountain bikes now and finally Chipps has built up the Lynskey Helix twisty-tubed 29er. It’s been built with lovely SRAM XX, with a Easton Haven bar/stem and a Maverick uppy/downy post. Wheels are American Classic all mountain 29er wheels for a bit more burliness and there some WTB tyres on there.

Not to pre-empt the test of flat pedals, but have the straitlines, the nukeproofs, and the podiums, imho the podiums win. Strailines are good but a bit lardy, nukeproofs are light but look scruffy quite quickly and don’t have the grip of the strailines, whilst the podiums are awesome – light, bags of grip, and less pedal strike due to the slim-ness.

Some mental prices on those pedals. Especially as, as someone else pointed out, most are available for much less with a different badge on them. Those NS Bikes look suspiciously like Wellgos, which are a fraction of that money.